Hospitals use a variety of patient monitoring equipment to alert them of potential patient needs. Virtually all monitoring devices act in a stand-alone fashion, providing an audible alarm when an alert condition occurs. Many devices also provide a relay closure output to signal, or interface to nurse call systems. This allows the monitor alarm to appear at the door light, at the nurse console, on pagers and phones, and in nursing unit activity and response time reports. These alerts, however, are generic in nature and do not typically specify the type of alarm at hand. This is because the overhead and risk of mistake in manually updating the alarm priority outweigh the benefits of a unique alarm. Ideally, the nurse call alarm display from patient monitoring equipment would be unique to the specific type of monitoring device connected: i.e. IV drip, ventilator, or heart monitor.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide systems and methods that overcome many of these deficiencies and provide the ability to automatically assign patient monitoring equipment on a “location-based” paradigm, rather than physical assignments from manual configuration.